Space invader

The first thing to understand is that Civolution is a sandbox game. A big, heavy sandbox. It’s a cliché in heavy Euro games to say there are a lot of paths to victory, but in the case of Civolution it’s warranted. The first time you sit down to play the game the thing that hits you first is just how big the player boards are. The ”consoles’ as the game calls them are huge. My first thought was one of “Uh-oh, Stefan’s gone for a gimmick here to make the game stand out”, but that fear was pretty quickly allayed. The left side of the board is mostly used to house resources, while the right is your menu of actions.

At this point you might think it would be better to have a shared action board in the same way A Feast For Odin does it, but there are some pretty good reasons why that would never work. You see, in Civolution you all start with the same actions available to you, but as the game goes on you can upgrade the actions by flipping or removing the action tiles from their sockets, meaning that my Migrate action, for example, might be more powerful than yours. Strategy in the game is so woven into the combinations of actions and resources that having your actions right there in front of you, so personal, makes playing and understanding the game easier.

The resource side of the console you could argue could be done smaller, but I’m glad they didn’t. Unusually for a modern Euro, there aren’t a heap of different wooden or cardboard resources. In fact there are none! Each player has a pile of octagonal wooden pieces which have a variety of different uses. The different resource types each have a space on your console, and you use your wooden markers to show what you have. For example, if you collect two wood, you put two markers in the ‘wood’ space on the board. It’s so easy, and important (for me at least) is how quick it makes setup and teardown. The resource spaces are in rows and columns too, which denote which type of region they come from, and how much they’re worth if you trade them.

On top of all of this, figuratively as well as literally, is the big, empty, unusual space above the board. This space is where you slot in cards you’ve been able to play, giving you yet more decisions to make, and a chance to build a powerful engine to drive your civilisation forward. Cards get slotted into rows and columns. The higher the row, the more points it’s worth at the end of the game, but the more expensive it is to place it. Placement is a trickier decision than you might think, because once you play a card of a certain colour into a slot, all subsequent cards of the same colour have to go in that same column. So despite the player boards being so large, they serve a genuine purpose.

In addition to the consoles you need to find space for two more boards and a jigsaw-style map, but with them being modular you can make it work with whatever table space you might have available.

Dicing with destiny

I used a lot of words to try and convey how big and imposing Civolution is, but I did it for a good reason. This game looks daunting and confusing, and that in itself is enough to put people off. Maybe not people like you and I, people who love a heavy game, but those who you’d like to welcome to the dark side who are heavy-curious. Once you get past that initial ‘Woah’ factor, playing the game is really not that bad. I mentioned Castles of Burgundy at the top of this review, and you can see some of its DNA in Civolution. Actions are driven by your personal stash of dice. If you don’t like the values on your dice you can use ‘ideas’ in the same way you could ‘workers’ in Castles to change the value one step. You place dice on spots matching their values, take the action, then remove them. Sound familiar? Each action requires two dice of different values, so while it’s true that someone could just roll lucky each round, the reality is that you need to allow for a bit of mitigation in your plans.

There’s a central pool of extra dice you can take from by using a certain action, and extra dice are a good thing, because it means you can take more actions before you’re forced to take a reset turn. Reset turns are what drive each round towards completion and although a necessity, often feel like a wasted turn. Everyone else is doing something, and you’re stuck rolling your dice instead. Even in this though, this simple cycle of dice rolling and using, there’s strategy. If someone grabs a load of dice early in the game you might think it gives them an insurmountable advantage long-term, but taking a minute to extrapolate what’s going on makes you realise it’s not necessarily the case. They took turns to claim those dice for a start, and while they might have lots of dice to spend, if the rest of the players are driving the round towards its end with frequent resets, they might not get the chance to use them all.

That’s just one small example of the layers upon layers of strategy bubbling under the surface of Civolution. All of these words so far and I’ve not even touched on the map in the middle of the table, which is what the whole game is built around. You send your tribes out in the world to collect resources and build farms and settlements. As they move from region to region they discover new resources and uncover new landmarks. So far, so 4X, but it introduces a really interesting layer of economics into the game which I think is under-appreciated.

You can only gather resources once they’ve been discovered by migrating tribes into new regions. This lets people Produce resources in them, then later Transport (two of the game’s actions) to move them to their boards to use. However, you can also use the Trade action to gain resources. If they’ve been discovered on the map those resources cost two Gold each. If they haven’t, you can still buy them, but they cost four gold, and gold is hard to come by. If nobody decides to explore the continent – which is a perfectly valid strategy – you need to make sure you’ve got a good economy, or you’re going to struggle to build and pay for cards later in the game.

It’s such a unique direction for a modern Euro to take. To have a game which can be so different every time you play it, and to have so much of the game’s meandering path from start to end dictated by the players’ actions.

Making tracks

Euro fans rejoice – Civolution has tracks. Six of them! Well, five with an extra, little track on another board, but hey, a track’s a track. The tracks grant you rewards and end-of-game points, but some are randomly chosen during the game setup to give some big points at the end of each of the four eras. You climb the tracks by playing cards that come with a cost, and then form a part of your own engine. It’s all very by-the-books from that point of view, and that’s good, because we like those things in a game. But for a game to stand out, it needs something different. Something interesting. A hook.

Civolution’s hook is the dice. The white dice are used to conduct actions – two dice per action, and the dice used have to match those on the action. As mentioned earlier, there are ways to mitigate for unlucky rolls, and in order to do well you need to allow yourself to take the occasional turn to bolster those mitigation options. Then you have the pink dice which are used for hunting and passing tests in the game, and those tests are usually ways to boost the effectiveness of upgraded actions. At first, you have one pink die and only pass if you roll a one, but as the game goes on you get the chance to get more dice, and by moving up the sixth (Agera) track, the number range you need to roll gets bigger. Hitting 1-3 on three dice is much more likely than a 1 on one die.

The dice form the bulk of the game’s player interaction too. There are only a few extra pink and white dice to claim (player count + 1), so what happens when they all get claimed? The action to take a die still exists on all players’ boards, so when you perform it when all the dice are claimed, you take a die from the player with the most of the colour you chose. Aside from dice thievery, the other direct interaction comes when you move tribes around the map. You can kick someone out of their spot and into ‘the wilderness’, at the expense of weakening your own tribe. It’s nice, there’s just enough bite there to keep things interesting without the game devolving into a game of spite and take-that!

Final thoughts

Trying to keep this review around 1500 words has proved really difficult, which is why it now tops 2000. I just want to talk and ramble about it so much. It rode a huge wave of hype after Essen, and I like to make a point of waiting for that initial hype to die down before I play and review a game, because it’s easy to get swept along, even subconsciously. Civolution was worth the wait. It sounds ridiculous to say, so I’m hesitant to even give life to the words, but this might just be Stefan’s magnum opus ahead of Castles of Burgundy as far as I’m concerned. And that’s coming from someone who’s bought three different versions of CoB over the years and has over 50 games logged on BGA on top of real-life plays.

The way that every game feels and unfolds differently is great. Yes, the actions on offer are the same each time, and the map is only randomised to a certain extent, but the way things play out differs every time. The example I gave above about nobody exploring is just one example. In a recent 4-player game we stuck to a third of the map and things were tight. I discovered stone – a resource that you need for quite a lot of early game things – in the fourth and final era, which brought a collective “Oh my god! Finally!” from the table. In another game one player found himself alone in a corner of the world with three tribes and no competition and ended up racking up a load of points by moving around the regions in a circle (one space in each region gives VPs for occupying it).

I want to make a special mention of the production in Civolution. The player boards are huge, but premium, and I love the way that it just uses the same octagonal pieces for everything in the game. It makes setup and teardown so easy, so quick and means that I don’t have to factor that time into the ‘have we got time to play this?’ decision at game night, and to me that’s a blessing. The huge raft of actions available will undoubtedly put some people off, and if you don’t already like heavy games, I don’t think this is the one that’ll change your mind, but the rest of you will love it. A glorious sandbox which feels like all the best bits of Stefan Feld’s designs rolled up into one beautiful game. A must-have in my opinion.

Civolution (2024)

Design: Stefan Feld
Publisher: Deep Print Games
Art: Dennis Lohausen
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 120-240 mins

The post Civolution Review appeared first on Punchboard.

A couple of years ago the publisher, Alea, and Stefan got their heads together and decided to revamp the game. They gave it a fresh lick of paint, bundled in the seven mini-expansions that got released after the original’s release, threw in another one, and that’s what I’m looking at here, the Anniversary Edition.

Why am I covering it now?

Expectations these days are high. When people tear the shrink off of a new game, they’re expecting high-quality components, deep, interwoven mechanics, custom meeples, legacy envelopes, and all that jazz. So if you’re new to the hobby and you open Castles and see a few dice, a small board, thin player mats, and vast supply of tiny cardboard hexes, you could be forgiven for feeling underwhelmed. If a game is good though, it doesn’t matter, right? That begs the question: is The Castles of Burgundy still good?

Have the games that have come since improved and refined the core mechanics and made something similar, but better? Should I still buy this game in 2021?

Yes. Yes you should

The Castles of Burgundy is a classic for a reason. And yes, it is a classic, it must be, it says so in the rule book.

Admittedly, it does look dated on the table now, even with the colourful redesign, but the game is still so good, and so much fun to play. I’ve taught this to non-gamers and fans of heavy games alike, and everyone has picked it up quickly, been able to employ some kind of strategy, and had a good time filling their little board with tiles.

I’ve heard some people saying that they don’t like the redesign, they don’t like the abundance of colour. I think it’s mostly purists who like the muted colours of the older Stefan Feld games like the original, or Notre Dame, so don’t let that put you off.

What makes it so special?

At its core, Castles of Burgundy is very simple. You roll a couple of dice, then either pick up a hex tile from the area matching one of the numbers rolled, or lay a previously claimed one onto your board, into a space with a matching number. The bigger the area you manage to fill, the more points you score. For the first half of the game you’ll find yourself concentrating on your own little kingdom, planning out what you’re going to build, and where.

As the game gets going though, and score markers start advancing around the board, you start to get aware of what the other players are doing on their boards. In part, because they’re taking tiles you had your heart set on, but also because you can start to play more tactically. Maybe taking that pasture full of cows denies them that amazing giant pasture that would have scored them 20 points, or maybe claiming a boat you can’t possibly use, just to make sure you stay ahead in turn order. Choices, choices.

In my opinion, nothing has nailed the medium-weight tile placement Euro game better than Castles of Burgundy, even now. The combination of simple turns (rolling two dice and taking two actions), and the strategic gameplay that emerges more with every play, make it a fantastic gateway game. I can teach this to new players and watch them enjoy building their board, while I work at more involved strategies, and the scores still don’t look like there’s a runaway winner. It works at all levels of experience.

The Negatives

My only criticisms really are the same as in the original version. The iconography on some of the tiles is a) tiny, and b) hard to decipher. Sure, once you’ve played it a few times, there’s no problem, and they’ve made a huge improvement by adding player aids which explain them better. For those first few games though, keep the rule book to one side to refer to it.

The other thing is organising the tiles. If you don’t add some opaque bags to draw tiles from, you need to create face-down stacks of each colour before the game starts. Not the end of the world, but a small annoyance.

There’s a lot of game in the box. The expansions really are mini-expansions that only change small things in the core game, but they do add new hexes and mechanics. There are also so many double-sided player boards in the box that it’s impossible to create a strategy that would cover all of them. I’ve owned the original since it was released, and I still play it, and I still enjoy every game, regardless of it being two, three or four players.

Speaking of player count…

Before I finish, it’s worth mentioning that there are two (count ’em) new ways to play The Castles of Burgundy now. First up, there’s a Team mode, where two player boards are joined together to make a huge Duchy to fill up. I’ve not had a chance to play that way yet, thanks to our friend Covid, but I can see how it’ll be good fun.

Secondly, and probably more importantly in our lockdown lives at the moment, there’s a solo mode. It’s not an automa-style game versus an AI player. Instead it’s a puzzle, trying to fill the specially-designed boards within the 25 turns you get in the game. It’s a really fun, engaging puzzle, far more entertaining and worth playing that some of the beat-your-own-score variants I’ve played. It’s tough though, I still haven’t completed it.

Final Thoughts

The Castles of Burgundy really is a classic, and it’s excellent. Stefan Feld’s designs are usually brilliant, and this is no exception. It’s one of his lightest games, in terms of complexity, but I think it’s his most fun. I still love it, ten years on, so much so that I’m going to keep this and the original in my collection. This isn’t the view of someone with rose-tinted spectacles who misses the simpler, pre-Kickstarter days of board games. This is the view of someone who enjoys good games, and knows one when he plays one. In my opinion, nobody has taken the core mechanics of this game, and bettered it.

There are a lot of lesser games you could be spending your £40 on, so if you’re after a bona fide classic that’ll keep hitting your table, I highly recommend The Castles of Burgundy.

Designer: Stefan Feld
Publisher: Alea, Ravensburger Games
Art: Antje Stephan, Claus Stephan
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 60-90 minutes

Review copy provided by Ravensburger Games. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

The post The Castles Of Burgundy Review appeared first on Punchboard.

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Does the idea of gnomes, islands, guardians and bonfires get you excited? No? How about shells, fruit, roots and portals? Getting somewhere yet? Hmmm. Okay, how about a lavish new Stefan Feld game, full of mechanisms, strategy and gorgeous artwork? Ahhh, now I’ve got your attention! Let’s have a look at Bonfire, his big new game for 2020.

Stefan Feld is an important name for fans of Euro games. He’s the designer we have to thank for some of the most important games to have been produced in the last fifteen years. Trajan, Macao, Bruges, and a little game you might have heard of called The Castles of Burgundy. He’s been a busy boy in 2020, announcing a re-theming of several of his classics for the City Collection, a new ‘Castles of’ game, this time in Tuscany, and the one which really piqued my interest, and the one you’re here to read about – Bonfire.

Bonfire’s backstory isn’t the usual Feld fare. It tells of a world were bonfires brought light to a world of perpetual darkness, created and maintained by the guardians. When the inhabitants exploited them however, the guardians retreated, and the world was once again plunged into inky darkness. Now you, and a group of gnomes aim to bright light back by completing tasks to prove your worth to the guardians, and convince them to return from their islands to re-light the bonfires.

What’s In The Box

The more cynical among us would think back to the likes of The Castles of Burgundy or Notre Dame, and think of beige. There wasn’t much in the way of colour in his older games, and the components and boards could be pretty thin, not much to write home about. Bonfire, however, is a different story.

The first thing to notice is the board. It’s covered in rich, detailed artwork, and the back-side of it has a huge version of the illustration of the guardian from the box cover. Instead of cubes for player pieces, there are little gnome meeples, and the resources are custom-cut, brightly painted pieces of wood. Each player has their own player board, and there are a ton of different tokens and tiles in the box; action, fate, task, offering and path tiles. There are wooden guardians and boats, three decks of cards, loads of little portal tiles, and even a 3D bonfire you have to build from three pieces of cardboard.

Considering it’s a smaller box, like the old Alea ones used for the likes of Castles of Burgundy or Macao, there’s a huge amount of stuff in it. The production values are a far cry from those Alea games. Everything feels like it’s going to last a long time. The iconography is really clear throughout, and the rule book is really nicely written. It’s a good thing too, as you’ll need to refer to it quite a lot for the first few games, because there’s a handy appendix at the back telling you exactly what the specialist and elder cards do.

How Does It Play?

Bonfire is a meaty, thinky game, so let’s break it down and explain what’s going on.

The Basics

Players collect and use action tiles, to perform the various actions available. To get action tiles, they take fate tiles from their own area, and place them onto their player boards. In a similar way to the way the games Patchwork and A Feast For Odin work, the fate tiles have to fit onto the players’ boards. You get one action tile for each symbol, but if the fate tile you place has a matching action adjacent, you get two action tiles. Later, if a third matching one touches, you get three.

Spending your action tokens is where the rest of the game is played, but there are a lot of choices available at any one time. You might choose to sail to an island, to trade some of your resources to take a task. The task goes on your player board, and later if you manage to fulfill that task (which ranges from easy to difficult), you can flip it to light a bonfire.

You can rotate the great bonfire and claim two of the three rewards available at each slot. This is often one of the portal tokens, to add to your player board (every type is a different shape, jigsaw-style), and then either a resource or an action tile. Maybe instead you choose to claim one of the cards available: specialists and elders. Specialists usually grant you ongoing bonuses for performing certain actions, and elders are in limited supply, but give you a one-time VP bonus for having numbers of various ‘things’ in your possession.

What Else Can I Do?

I’m glad you asked. You can choose to claim a path tile. Path tiles are added clockwise around your player board, and give the guardians somewhere to move when you choose to trigger a procession. Speaking of which, when you’ve recovered one more guardians from an island, you can trigger a procession. This sees them advance along your path tiles, and either granting bonus resources for the space they stop on, or, if there’s a portal between their path and the board, they can stand next to one of your bonfires, for end game VPs.

Those are the basics, and I’ve really boiled them down to the most basic descriptions of each, because there are so many variations on each action, and so many choices to make along the way. Here’s an example of what I mean,

When rotating the great bonfire to claim a portal tile, portals have to be added counter-clockwise to your player board. Each space on your board will only fit one particular portal, which are distributed around the great bonfire at random. So when it comes to rotating the bonfire, you can spend a single purple tile to rotate it one space, two for two spaces, or three for any number. If you don’t have enough purple action tiles, you can spend two of any other kind to compensate for one you’re missing. Or you could recruit a specialist card which allows you to more move spaces per tile, or maybe the specialist who lets you add the portals in any order, depending on which are available. Of course, having those purple tiles depends on how you laid the fate tiles on your board in the first place, as I mentioned above.

How Is The End Of The Game Triggered?

Around your player board, you have seven ‘novice’ gnome meeples in your colour. When you complete a retrieved task – say for example collecting four guardians – you can use an action to trigger lighting a bonfire. This flips the task tile, giving you end-game VPs, and also lets you place one of your gnomes on one of the High Council spaces on the main board. These spaces grant you a one-time bonus of your choosing, dependent on where you place them.

The other way to fill the high council spaces is completing one of the communal common tasks, e.g. having five guardians. When these are fulfilled, the player completing it can take the associated neutral novice and add them to the High Council. Once enough spaces in the High Council are filled, which varies depending on the player count, a countdown begins. The five countdown tiles are passed from player to player as they take their turns, meaning each player has just five turns to squeeze as many points as they can from the game.

At the end of the game, points are scored for lit bonfires, having guardians next to bonfires, having bonfires matching the colour of the path next to it, having portals, and a few other bits. Each of these though is only worth a small number of points, so the game is a real puzzle of maximising benefits and planning ahead. The person with the most points, wins.

Having Trouble Deciding What Kind Of Game This Is?

Me too! It seems to be a mix of set collection, tile placement, and movement with the ships and islands at the top of the board. It’s undoubtedly a Euro, but it really seems to be genre-less, and it makes for a really interesting change to my usual go-to of worker placement or tableau building. I think because it seems to be its own thing, it has the potential to appeal to a lot of different players.

Final Thoughts

Trying to explain how Bonfire works and plays is almost as tricky as playing the game itself. In both instances, it’s not a problem of actions being difficult – they’re actually very easy. You collect some action tiles, you spend them to do those actions. Not brain-bending stuff. But how you use those actions, that’s where the crunch comes.

The Agony Of Choice

If you like working out a plan, this is absolutely the game for you. Indecision is your worst enemy in Bonfire. You need to work backwards, taking an early look at the board, the tasks available, the starting specialists and path tiles, and then try to guess how many of action type you might need.

From there, you can start to look at your fate tiles, and decide how you might want to place them in order to get enough of each action, and even the order you take them. Your fate tiles are laid out in a stack, randomly ordered, and when you claim one you can only choose the top or bottom one.

Even when you’ve formulated your plan, now you need to start looking at the other players’ boards too. If you decide you want to get guardians next to bonfires, you’re going to need portals. These are all around the great bonfire, and the order you need to collect them varies from player to player – the player boards aren’t identical. But the portals are placed counter-clockwise, starting at the last space and working back, whereas the path tiles that the guardians will advance along, to get to your portals, and then the bonfires, are laid in the opposite order! Argh!

But this agony, this brain-melting series of choices, is where this game really shines.

Variety Is The Spice Of Life

With so many choices available to you, and so many ways to keep the VPs trickling in, and with the random game board setup for each game, I can guarantee that no two games of Bonfire will ever go the same way. If you try to tell yourself before the game is even setup that ‘this time I’m going to grab as many specialists as I can, and complete those tricky, valuable yellow tasks‘, you’ll likely fail. Understanding how each part of the game connects to, and weaves into the next is important if you want to do well.

It’s a beautiful kaleidoscope of options, and immediately feels very Feld-like to anyone who spent a lot of time playing Castles of Burgundy. Your primary focus is on your own board, your own laying of tiles and collection of resources, but with a shared main source of ‘stuff’, and a necessity to keep one eye on what the others are doing.

If you have a group who suffer with AP (analysis paralysis), and overthinking everything, Bonfire can take a long time to play, and you might even consider setting a house rule time limit per turn. On the whole though, things balance out, as you can be doing your own nefarious scheming while others are playing their turns. It’s also a really heavy game in my opinion, so I wouldn’t recommend trying to get anyone new to the hobby to start here. It’d be enough to put them off for life, and we don’t want that.

Table For One, Sir?

There’s a really well implemented solo mode in the box. Players are pitted against an automa player named Tom (as in auTOMa…), and if you ever play solo games, you’ll be pleased to hear it’s really quick and easy to do the upkeep for. He doesn’t use action tiles, move his ship around, or any of that stuff. Tom has a small deck of cards which describe an action, so you flip the next, and do what it tells you to e.g. take the highest value task from an island with a fruit resource on it, or rotate the great bonfire to the next spot with the next portal he needs, and take it.

Tom is a tough opponent, and the key to beating him is not letting him cycle through his full deck the maximum of four times it’s possible. How you do that, I’ll let you figure out for yourselves.

Should I Buy Bonfire?

In a word, yes. But with a couple of caveats.

If you’re here, reading this, or checking out Bonfire at all, it’s unlikely you stumbled across it while you were looking at Monopoly on Amazon, so I’m going to assume you like a Euro or a Feld game. If that’s the case, and if you like games on the heavier side, I think you’ll love Bonfire. The interplay of actions, the sheer variety of choices available in how to play, the ‘market’ of the great bonfire – it’s standard Euro fare, but implemented really well.

You’ll also really enjoy that crunch when the end of the game is triggered, and you know you only have five turns left. From there you’re performing mental gymnastics to eke out every last point you can. If you really suffer from AP, or you really don’t like that sort of thing, then this probably isn’t the game for you. If, however, that sort of thing really gets you itching to get the shrinkwrap off a new game, then this is a classic example of all the good things from a Stefan Feld game, and I’m sure will be mentioned in years to come in the same breath as Castles of Burgundy and Macao.

The post Bonfire Review appeared first on Punchboard.